It’s that time of the year again: Spooky season! Which for us begins with the first day of Knott’s Halloween Haunt, always a Thursday. (And which, for a decade was so empty you didn’t need to buy any special fast passes, but that time, oddly, has passed. Apparently not enough people have to work on Friday any more.) Given the variability of traffic patterns, we have for years journeyed down to Buena Park in the morning and killed time at the Korean movie theater before heading off to the park. Since our little experiment with totalitarianism a few years ago, that theater cut down its weekday hours to start late in the afternoon unfortunately.

Which left us in a position to watch our second top 20 film of the year: Deadpool & Wolverine. Let me say, first of all, that we didn’t hate it. That’s important because the rest of this review might make you think otherwise. It’s mercifully short for a modern superhero flick, at two hours and seven minutes, though you sure as hell wouldn’t it want to be any longer. A fourth-wall gag has Deadpool apologizing for the movie length, in fact, which actually pretty well sums up this movie: It’s not just a commentary on the superhero genre, it’s a commentary on the commentary.

This is what Hollywood is reduced to. Watching this—or any big budget movie these days—is sort of like watching your figure skating team at the Olympics when it’s going through a bad patch. (Debi Thomas, anyone?) There’s tremendous skill and a huge talent pool and craftsmanship everywhere, but you’re just so sure someone’s going to faceplant, you’re ecstatic when they don’t, and you kind of cheer too loudly when they accomplish something awkwardly but without crashing completely.

As a comedy, it’s fine. I’ll take it. A lot of jokes that qualify as “irreverent” these days, though honestly the shots at tweaking the morality police at Disney are misses. I can believe they have a rule against characters sniffing cocaine, but nobody for a second believes this is anything other than cynical marketing. The movie is very aware that its role is to entertain, and it puts a lot of energy into keeping things lively.

The plot, which is not very important, is confusing and dumb. It’s multiverse time—something also lampshaded in the climactic fight scene with all the Deadpools, said lampshading not, in fact, providing any kind of cover for the fact that multiverses are the worst lazy writer’s device since time travel.

OK, I had to research the plot just now because it depends on you having seen Deadpool 2, apparently. The Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) from universe 10,005 flees to the 616 (sacred) universe to try to be an Avenger. He gets rejected by Jon Favreau (cute) because he’s there to win back his girlfriend, and that’s not really a good enough reason to be an Avenger. (I mean, you’re essentially an immortal being with nigh-unlimited powers. You’d think you could, y’know, save the world locally, but this guy needs approval from an entirely different universe, apparently.) So he goes into car sales, which of course he sucks at.

On his birthday he ends up being kidnapped by the Time Variance Authority (TVA), where a middle manager by the name of Mr. Paradox (Matthew MacFayden) is working up a MacGuffin (lampshaded) that will give the power to destroy timelines. Paradox wants to recruit Deadpool, but Deadpool flees and searches the multiverses to find a not-dead version of Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) because that’s the title of the movie. And also universes have “anchor beings” who, when they die the universes die with them. And apparently, 10,005’s universe’s anchor being was Wolverine who, in case you didn’t know, died in Logan back in 2017.

Deadpool figures that if he can find a live Wolverine and bring him to 10,005, his universe will stop ceasing to exist.

Good lord, I write sci-fi and this is making my head hurt.

Anyway, you might just notice something else in this movie: Besides having lots of jokes, the cast is very good-looking. Bit parts and even Negasonic Teenage Warhead, whose kind of ugly attitude is part of the shtick, looks less offensive. (The actual actress, Brianna Hildebrand, is quite lovely.) I felt like this was part of the plan to be entertaining and not punishing the audience for coming to the movies.

The movie drags in a few places: The action set pieces aren’t as interminably dull as usual, because there are some good gags. There’s actually a very fine one in a Honda Accord between Deadpool and Wolverine, with the only problem being it’s both incredibly dumb for them to fight then (they’re on the run), and also completely pointless (they’re essentially cartoons). Another fight, not long after the Honda fight, features X-23, Blade, Elektra and Gambit (Dafne Keen, Wesley Snipes, Jennifer Garner and Channing Tatum, respectively) is also pretty good and has some bearing on the plot.

Primarily, however, the movie has the “Family Guy” problem (or the problem that show had in 2005, when I last watched). You can make me laugh at a gag where someone suffers horribly at the hands of a hero or protagonist, but you can’t then turn around and convince me that I should invest in the reality or heroism of these characters. At two different points in this movie, Deadpool gets a person killed for a laugh. It’s fine, good for a yuk. But then how do you sell “well, but it matters if THESE characters die?”

Not very well, I have to say. And Reynolds is a fine actor. Jackman is terrific. Really, the whole cast does a good job. But what they’re trying for isn’t something I’ve ever seen work in an American movie.

It reminded me of the other top 20 film we saw, The Fall Guy, in that it didn’t suck, it was a perfectly fine time-waster, and by the time I finish writing his review, I’ll forget it forever.

Victory

Which brings us to our second film, a Korean film called Victory which we went to because it was the only Korean film we hadn’t seen. I can say our expectations were low—much higher than they were for Deadpool 3, but still quite low given it’s a high school-based drama about girls who have lost their dance club at school and so shanghai a new girl into making a cheerleader club for their flailing soccer team.

Low stakes. Melodrama. Teenage girls. How good can it be?

And the answer is, unsurprisingly, damn good. First of all, it’s the absolute antithesis of Deadpool 3. The superhero movie thrives on sarcasm, meta-humor, nudge-and-a-wink, and the cheerleader movie exudes sincerity from every frame.

Our heroine is a 17-year-old girl—okay, not in real life, I’m pretty sure the entire high school cast is in their 20s and maybe even 30s—who wants to be a dancer. She was held back a year for fighting in their dance club (which was on campus), but ends up with her cronies at a soccer game where the school’s hapless team (motto: “It’s okay to lose!”) is embarrassed once again. When a brother and sister arrive from Seoul, the team gets a shot in the arm from the very skilled brother, and the heroine and her pals light on starting a cheerleading club as a front for being able to dance again.

There’s a fun montage where the girls in the school try out for the team, and the movie does an excellent job of giving us nine different girls who are nonetheless established as characters fairly well in a short time.

And the twist is, of course, that the heroine discovers that she enjoys cheering on and contributing to the success of the team. (She makes up a bogus stat about how everyone does 50% better when they’re being cheered on, as discovered at Harvard University in England.)

There are some other great bits, too. She’s a teen girl so she’s very emotional and she’s always saying “I’ve lost my appetite!” at the dinner table, and her father notes that her food is all gone. Her father works as a supervisor in a shipyard and at one point has to literally grovel for his job, and she’s disgusted by this. And the two fight over it, with him challenging her thought process that life is so easy, and her challenging back that he thinks life is super-hard. (I mean, he’s a single dad raising a teen daughter.)

But later she runs off to the big city and—well, life turns out to be pretty easy for her. She’s apparently just that good. This was an interesting twist that made the climactic scene very much more meaningful, even though, as mentioned it was very low stakes.

The thing about storytelling is that they’ve all been told. So a lot of the things that keep a movie fresh are being surprising, even in little ways. For example, there’s a love triangle: City boy/soccer hero likes the heroine but her childhood friend (a goalie) has been pining after her for ten years. So the cliché would be to have one of them win her over. It just never comes to that here (and one sort of suspects she wouldn’t end up with either of them, because she has bigger dreams).

Or, the fact that the local girls are kind of mean to the City Girl would, in the cliché, end up with the City Girl and the heroine being best friends, but that never really happens either. They form a team, and they work together, but the heroine’s best friend stays her best friend throughout.

There was just a lot going on in terms of character development and cohesive plot here, even though this is a fairly minor movie: The latest entry in the Roundup series and the hottest horror, Exhuma, both made around $80M at the Korean BO, compared to this film’s $3M. It just feels very self-assured, perhaps the result of not forgetting how to “human” as so many in Hollywood seem to have.

This is also the least prurient movie about cheerleaders I’ve ever seen. The girls are varying degrees of pretty, and very different one to the next, but their outfits are modest and since it takes place in 1999, they dress like Poochie otherwise.

You know how I normally say “This movie makes you feel proud to be a Korean?” It’s true, but the distinctly Asian form of fascism, where what your kid does in school might cost you your job, which is working your friends and neighbors to death, is very apparent here.

Overall, though, it’s just very wholesome and earnest. A good antidote to the decadent cynicism of Deadpool 3. We were quite pleased.